Thwarted Panorama

Seven days feels like forever. It was in seven days the world as we know it and mankind was created. But what does seven days mean to one individual? In an inestimable sea of roving souls sailing the indeterminate vastness of this hallowed world, the last seven days conceded to become the cusp of my retrieving reclamation. The essence of the convalescence is now attained.

It was yesterday on the sixth day that I realised the cracks of my illusory invulnerability to the indiscretions dealt out were sipping through with allusions of relapsing. And as I was driving home, the kingly sight that splayed before my very eyes shaped the thwarted panorama of a possible individual who resided in the realm of receding reveries many, many years ago.

If I could chance that I once knew this individual, he was a man of timeless enthrallment. His state of being and air of presence were so pure and defined in his infantile existence that his very actions spawned a lifetime of imaginary serenities in the minds of people.

A boy who formed an attachment to his dog that when it left this world, he discarded his birth name and rechristened himself after his departed canine and would forever be known by that very name till he too came to pass.

A teenager who eventually gave up his childhood Christian faith and submitted into the amorphous atheist belief of a humanist and naturalist, not long after his beloved mother yielded to cancer.

A young adult where through his determinative years, imagined and created, chanced and manipulated, then expressed and conveyed the précis of all his abstractly formed attempts in provoking a realm of infinite likelihoods and convicting conscience.

A man who ultimately became a herald in pioneering one of the earliest form of fantasy writings for children in an epic and ambitious proportion culminating in a ménage of classics who also at this time rediscovered his Christian origin and re-embraced his childhood creed.

And finally an accomplished human being who captivated hearts and minds beyond a generation by his deeds and triumphs but whose devotion was also once again tested when he had to endure the claiming of his wife by the very malady that reaped his mother.

No one wants to ever live a day without their soulmate. He went through three years before following on to the other side.

I guess at the very end of it all, does it really even matter what he ever did and said in his lifetime? For if words from a man is to become the definition of his existence, then the man truly existed beyond his definitive words.

Because it is the very words of the last paragraph that so spurned my heart and belief in the first place that I had to understand why they were ever immortalised beyond his existence. It is now after understanding his heritage and affluence in life do I finally grasp the cusp of Clive Staples’ realm of receding reveries.

It is disturbingly heartening yet convincingly disconcerting to know that the creator of one of the best known stories for children vastly based on a love theme for everything that is alive yet being distinct in life, could paint a canvass of disparaging import for the very theme he so strongly based his works on.

In our seven days, we both discovered the different sides to the same coin.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

--C.S. Lewis